About Jim Gray
James Nicholas Gray (1944 – declared dead in absentia 2012) was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation". == Early years and personal life == Gray was born in San Francisco, the second child of Ann Emma Sanbrailo, a teacher, and James Able Gray, who was in the U.S. Army; the family moved to Rome, Italy, where Gray spent most of the first three years of his life; he learned to speak Italian before English. The family then moved to Virginia, spending about four years there, until Gray's parents divorced, after which he returned to San Francisco with his mother. His father, an amateur inventor, patented a design for a ribbon cartridge for typewriters that earned him a substantial royalty stream. After being turned down for the Air Force Academy he entered the University of California, Berkeley as a freshman in 1961. To help pay for college, he worked as a co-op for General Dynamics, where he learned to use a Monroe calculator. Discouraged by his chemistry grades, he left Berkeley for six months, returning after an experience in industry he later described as "dreadful". Gray earned his B.S. in engineering mathematics (Math and Statistics) in 1966. After marrying, Gray moved with his wife Loretta to New Jersey, his wife's home state; she worked as a teacher and he worked at Bell Labs on a digital simulation that was to be part of Multics. At Bell, he worked three days a week and spent two days as a Master's student at New York University's Courant Institute.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.